Outdoor Living

Not the prefab home of the past

These are green and strikingly modern in design

Nexterra Green Homes are modern and modular and they're coming to Toronto.

Photograph by: Handout photo
, Nexterra Green Homes

While manufactured homes have come a long way from being associated with trailer parks, Nexterra Green Homes takes the idea of houses built in a factory, and then assembled on site, to a new level of sophistication. Not only are the four Nexterra Green Homes - soon to appear in Toronto - modern in design, they will be LEED Platinum; in other words, as environmentally friendly as it gets.

Gary Lands and Barry Campbell (a friend) founded Nexterra Green Homes. Gary runs the day-to-day operations of the company. One of the first misconceptions he clarifies is that the main advantage of a prefab is that it's less expensive. "A manufactured home is good value, but I think it's more that it's a better way to build," Gary says. "Workmanship is more precise in a factory environment. Weather conditions don't impact the quality or timing of the work. We can also control costs better in a plant as well."

He also trumpets the environmental angle: "There's far less waste in a factory, and the waste that is created can be easily recycled," Gary says. As for whether building a house in modules creates issues, he insists there aren't any. "It's the opposite," Gary says. "The modules have to be structurally very strong for transport. You get a very soundly constructed house this way."

After Gary and Barry founded the company, they engaged LivingHomes, a leading designer of prefab homes in Santa Monica, Calif. Working together, they spent considerable time planning their first project - four homes on an urban ravine in North Toronto. With a concept in mind, they surveyed different factories in Canada to construct the modules. Eventually, choosing a plant in Indiana because of the team's eagerness to work on a custom project, and because they had experience making modules to Canadian building standards.

The construction of the modules took only a few weeks. Once shipped to the site, they were installed on the foundation, and a local contractor took over to install geothermal heating and cooling, the water and electrical components and to finish the interiors.

Don't today's building codes make most houses environmentally better? "They help, but codes don't come close to our standards," Gary says. "And they certainly don't pick countertops or finishes that are environmentally appropriate, or appliances that are the best green choice."

One of the fascinating things about this project is that the houses are strikingly modern. "Barry and I wanted to build houses we like, both in terms of environmental concerns and their style. We admire modern."

(How refreshing that the pair didn't assume a traditional design would be an easier sell, and thus make it the default build.)

Gary explains the architect of the houses is in sync with those who favour modern design. Ray Kappe, a legendary modern architect born in 1927, was a California designer and pioneer in the 1960s and '70s of modular design. His open-plan approach allowed for both spatial fluidity and what he believed were plans that were less expensive to build. His portfolio is the epitome of California cool, featuring elegant beach cottages in Malibu and houses in canyons around Los Angeles beautifully integrated into their natural sites.

You'd think local building officials would go out of their way to make houses such as Nexterra's as easy as possible to produce. Aside from the usual bureaucratic confusion and lack of communication between areas in the building department ("We don't talk to that department, you'll have to-) that nearly everyone who has ever been involved in such situations experiences, building something different - even if demonstrably better - is not for the faint of heart in Toronto. You have to be a bit of a zealot to stick with it. I think Gary and Barry's resolve will be rewarded when their first homes go on the market. For a three-plus bedroom house on a ravine in Toronto, finished to LEED Platinum standards, if you like modern, $1.7million sounds like a deal to me.

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